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I went back to Gibson with what seemed like a smart compromise, but she was determined. “Ewen can travel with you to Hong Kong, but he won’t meet the source until you and Laura both say you’re ready.”
Clearly, Ewen coming with us to Hong Kong was crucial to the Guardian. Gibson would need assurances about what was happening there and a way to assuage any worries her bosses in London might have. But Laura was just as adamant that we would travel alone. “If the source surveils us at the airport and sees this unexpected third person he doesn’t know, he’ll freak out and terminate contact. No way.” Like a State Department diplomat shuttling between Middle East adversaries in the futile hope of brokering a deal, I went back to Gibson, who gave a vague reply designed to signal that Ewen would follow a couple of days later. Or maybe that’s what I wanted to hear.
Either way, I learned from the travel person late that night that Ewen’s ticket had been bought—for the next day, on the same flight. And they were sending him on that plane no matter what.
In the car on the way to the airport, Laura and I had our first and only argument. I gave her the news as soon as the car pulled out of the hotel and she exploded with anger. I was jeopardizing the entire arrangement, she insisted. It was unconscionable to bring some stranger in at this late stage. She didn’t trust someone who hadn’t been vetted for work on something so sensitive and she blamed me for letting the Guardian risk our plan.
I couldn’t tell Laura that her concerns were invalid, but I did try to convince her that the Guardian was insistent, there was no choice. And Ewen would only meet the source when we were ready.
Laura didn’t care. To placate her anger, I even offered not to go, a suggestion she instantly rejected. We sat in miserable, angry silence for ten minutes as the car was stuck in traffic on the way to JFK.
I knew Laura was right: it shouldn’t have happened this way, and I broke the silence by telling her so. I then proposed that we ignore Ewen and freeze him out, pretend that he’s not with us. “We’re on the same side,” I appealed to Laura. “Let’s not fight. Given what’s at stake, this won’t be the last time that things happen beyond our control.” I tried to persuade Laura that we should keep our focus on working together to overcome obstacles. In a short time, we returned to a state of calm.
As we arrived in the vicinity of JFK Airport, Laura pulled a thumb drive out of her backpack. “Guess what this is?” she asked with a look of intense seriousness.
“What?”
“The documents,” she said. “All of them.”
* * *
Ewen was already at our gate when we arrived. Laura and I were cordial but cold, ensuring that he felt excluded, that he had no role until we were ready to give him one. He was the only present target for our irritation, so we treated him like extra baggage with which we had been saddled. It was unfair, but I was too distracted by the prospect of the treasures on Laura’s thumb drive and the significance of what we were doing to give much more thought to Ewen.
Laura had given me a five-minute tutorial on the secure computer system in the car and said she intended to sleep on the plane. She handed over the thumb drive and suggested that I start looking at her set of documents. Once we arrived in Hong Kong, she said, the source would ensure I had full access to my own complete set.
After the plane took off, I pulled out my new air gapped computer, inserted Laura’s thumb drive, and followed her instructions for loading the files.
For the next sixteen hours, despite my exhaustion, I did nothing but read, feverishly taking notes on document after document. Many of the files were as powerful and shocking as that initial PRISM PowerPoint presentation I had seen back in Rio. A lot of them were worse.
One of the first I read was an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which had been created by Congress in 1978, after the Church Committee discovered decades of abusive government eavesdropping. The idea behind its formation was that the government could continue to engage in electronic surveillance, but to prevent similar abuse, it had to obtain permission from the FISA court before doing so. I had never seen a FISA court order before. Almost nobody had. The court is one of the most secretive institutions in the government. All of its rulings are automatically designated top secret, and only a small handful of people are authorized to access its decisions.
The ruling I read on the plane to Hong Kong was amazing for several reasons. It ordered Verizon Business to turn over to the NSA “all call detail records” for “communications (i) between the United States and abroad; and (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” That meant the NSA was secretly and indiscriminately collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, at least. Virtually nobody had any idea that the Obama administration was doing any such thing. Now, with this ruling, I not only knew about it but had the secret court order as proof.
Moreover, the court order specified that the bulk collection of American telephone records was authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Almost more than the ruling itself, this radical interpretation of the Patriot Act was especially shocking.
What made the Patriot Act so controversial when it was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attack was that Section 215 lowered the standard the government needed to meet in order to obtain “business records,” from “probable cause” to “relevance.” This meant that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in order to obtain highly sensitive and invasive documents—such as medical histories, banking transactions, or phone records—needed to demonstrate only that those documents were “relevant” to a pending investigation.
But nobody—not even the hawkish Republican House members who authored the Patriot Act back in 2001 or the most devoted civil liberties advocates who depicted the bill in the most menacing light—thought that the law empowered the US government to collect records on everyone, in bulk and indiscriminately. Yet that’s exactly what this secret FISA court order, open on my laptop as I flew to Hong Kong, had concluded when instructing Verizon to turn over to the NSA all phone records for all of its American customers.
For two years Democratic senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of New Mexico had been going around the country warning that Americans would be “stunned to learn” of the “secret interpretations of law” the Obama administration was using to vest itself with vast, unknown spying powers. But because these spying activities and “secret interpretations” were classified, the two senators, who were members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had stopped short of disclosing to the public what they found so menacing, despite the legal shield of immunity granted to members of Congress by the Constitution to make such disclosures had they chosen to.
I knew as soon as I saw the FISA court order that this was at least part of the abusive and radical surveillance programs Wyden and Udall had tried to warn the country about. I instantly recognized the order’s significance. I could barely wait to publish it, sure that its exposure would trigger an earthquake, and that calls for transparency and accountability were sure to follow. And this was just one of hundreds of top secret documents I read on my way to Hong Kong.
Yet again, I felt my perspective shift on the significance of the source’s actions. This had already happened three times before: when I first saw the emails Laura had received, then again when I began speaking to the source, and yet again when I’d read the two dozen documents he sent by email. Only now did I feel that I was truly beginning to process the true magnitude of the leak.
On several occasions on the flight, Laura came over to the row where I was sitting, which faced the bulkhead of the plane. As soon as I saw her, I would pop up out of my seat and we’d stand in the open space of the bulkhead, speechless, overwhelmed, stunned by what we had.
Laura had been working for years on the subject of NSA surveillance, herself repeatedly subjected to its abuses. I had been writing about the threat posed by unconstrained domestic surveillance going back to 2006
, when I published my first book, warning of the lawlessness and radicalism of the NSA. With this work, both of us had struggled against the great wall of secrecy shielding government spying: How do you document the actions of an agency so completely shrouded in multiple layers of official secrecy? At this moment, we had breached that wall. We had in our possession, on the plane, thousands of documents that the government had desperately tried to hide. We had evidence that would indisputably prove all that the government had done to destroy the privacy of Americans and people around the world.
As I continued reading, two things struck me about the archive. The first was how extraordinarily well organized it was. The source had created countless folders and then sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. Every last document had been placed exactly where it belonged. I never found a single misplaced or misfiled document.
I had spent years defending what I view as the heroic acts of Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, the army private and whistle-blower who became so horrified at the behavior of the US government—its war crimes and other systematic deceit—that she risked her liberty to disclose classified documents to the world through WikiLeaks. But Manning was criticized (unfairly and inaccurately, I believe) for supposedly leaking documents that she had not first reviewed—in contrast to Daniel Ellsberg, the critics speculated. This argument, baseless though it was (Ellsberg was one of Manning’s most devoted defenders, and it seemed clear that Manning had at least surveyed the documents), was frequently used to undermine the notion that Manning’s actions were heroic.
It was clear that nothing of the sort could be said about our NSA source. There was no question that he had carefully reviewed every document he had given us, that he had understood their meaning, then meticulously placed each one in an elegantly organized structure.
The other striking facet of the archive was the extent of government lying it revealed, evidence of which the source had prominently flagged. He had titled one of his first folders “BOUNDLESS INFORMANT (NSA lied to Congress).” This folder contained dozens of documents showing elaborate statistics maintained by the NSA on how many calls and emails the agency intercepts. It also contained proof that the NSA had been collecting telephone and email data about millions of Americans every day. BOUNDLESS INFORMANT was the name of the NSA program designed to quantify the agency’s daily surveillance activities with mathematical exactitude. One map in the file showed that for a thirty-day period ending in February 2013, one unit of the NSA collected more than three billion pieces of communication data from US communication systems alone.
The source had given us clear proof that NSA officials had lied to Congress, directly and repeatedly, about the agency’s activities. For years, various senators had asked the NSA for a rough estimate of how many Americans were having their calls and emails intercepted. The officials insisted they were unable to answer because they did not and could not maintain such data: the very data extensively reflected in the “BOUNDLESS INFORMANT” documents.
Even more significant, the files—along with the Verizon document—suggested that the Obama administration’s senior national security official, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, lied to Congress when, on March 12, 2013, he was asked by Senator Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Clapper’s reply was as succinct as it was dishonest: “No, sir.”
* * *
In sixteen hours of barely interrupted reading, I managed to get through only a small fraction of the archive. But as the plane landed in Hong Kong, I knew two things for certain. First, the source was highly sophisticated and politically astute, evident in his recognition of the significance of most of the documents. He was also highly rational. The way he chose, analyzed, and described the thousands of documents I now had in my possession proved that. Second, it would be very difficult to deny his status as a classic whistle-blower. If disclosing proof that top-level national security officials lied outright to Congress about domestic spying programs doesn’t make one indisputably a whistle-blower, then what does?
I knew that the harder it would be for the government and its allies to demonize the source, the more powerful the effect of the source’s disclosures would be. The two most favored lines of whistle-blower demonization—“he’s unstable” and “he’s naive”—were not going to work here.
Shortly before landing, I read one final file. Although it was entitled “README_FIRST,” I saw it for the first time only at the very end of the flight. This document was another explanation from the source for why he had chosen to do what he did and what he expected to happen as a result, and it was similar in tone and content to the manifesto I had shown the Guardian editors.
But this document had facts the others did not. It included the source’s name—the first time I learned it—along with clear predictions for what would likely be done to him once he identified himself. Referring to events that proceeded from the 2005 NSA scandal, the note ended this way:
Many will malign me for failing to engage in national relativism, to look away from [my] society’s problems toward distant, external evils for which we hold neither authority nor responsibility, but citizenship carries with it a duty to first police one’s own government before seeking to correct others. Here, now, at home, we suffer a government that only grudgingly allows limited oversight, and refuses accountability when crimes are committed. When marginalized youths commit minor infractions, we as a society turn a blind eye as they suffer insufferable consequences in the world’s largest prison system, yet when the richest and most powerful telecommunications providers in the country knowingly commit tens of millions of felonies, Congress passes our nation’s first law providing their elite friends with full retroactive immunity—civil and criminal—for crimes that would have merited the longest sentences in [] history.
These companies … have the best lawyers in the country on their staff and they do not suffer even the slightest consequences. When officials at the highest levels of power, to specifically include the Vice President, are found on investigation to have personally directed such a criminal enterprise, what should happen? If you believe that investigation should be stopped, its results classified above-top-secret in a special “Exceptionally Controlled Information” compartment called STLW (STELLARWIND), any future investigations ruled out on the principle that holding those who abuse power to account is against the national interest, that we must “look forward, not backward,” and rather than closing the illegal program you would expand it with even more authorities, you will be welcome in the halls of America’s power, for that is what came to be, and I am releasing the documents that prove it.
I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end. I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant. If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the Internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.
Edward Joseph Snowden, SSN:
CIA Alias “”
Agency Identification Number:
Former Senior Advisor | United States National Security Agency, under corporate cover
Former Field Officer | United States Central Intelligence Agency, under diplomatic cover
Former Lecturer | United States Defense Intelligence Agency, under corporate cover
2
TEN DAYS IN HONG KONG
We arrived in Hong Kong on Sunday night, June 2. The plan was that we would meet Snowden immediately after we arrived in our hotel. As soon I got to my room, at the W Hotel in the upscale Kowloon District, I turned on the computer and looked for him on the encrypted chat program we used. As was almost always the case, he was there, waiting.
After exchanging a few pleasantries about the flight,
we got down to the logistics of our meeting. “You can come to my hotel,” he said.
That was my first surprise, to learn that he was staying in a hotel. I still didn’t know why he was in Hong Kong but assumed by this point that he had gone there to hide. I’d pictured him in some hovel, a cheap apartment where he could afford to go underground without a regular paycheck coming in, not comfortably installed in a hotel, out in the open, running up daily charges.
Changing our plans, we decided it would be best to wait until the morning to meet. It was Snowden who made the decision, setting the hyper-cautious, cloak-and-dagger mood of the next few days.
“You’ll be more likely to draw attention to yourselves if you move around at night,” he said. “It’s strange behavior for two Americans to check into their hotel at night and then immediately go out. It’ll be more natural if you come here in the morning.”
Snowden was worried as much about surveillance by Hong Kong and Chinese authorities as by the Americans. He was very concerned that we would be followed by local intelligence agents. Assuming he had some deep involvement with US spying agencies and knew what he was talking about, I deferred to his judgment but was disappointed that we wouldn’t be meeting that night.
With Hong Kong being exactly twelve hours ahead of New York, night and day were now reversed, so I hardly slept at all that night, nor at any other time during the trip. Jet lag was only partly to blame; in a state of barely controllable excitement, I was able to doze off for only ninety minutes or so, two hours at the most, and that remained my normal sleep pattern for the entire stay.
The next morning, Laura and I met in the lobby and entered a waiting cab to go to Snowden’s hotel. Laura was the one who had arranged the details of the meeting with him. She was very reluctant to speak in the taxi, fearing that the driver might be an undercover agent. I was no longer quite as quick as I might have been to dismiss such fears as paranoia. Despite the constraints, I pried enough out of Laura to understand the plan.